Jupiter Ultra users face fewer sandwich attacks than others, three-year study finds

Sandwich attacks on Solana are a full-blown epidemic, with 28 million recorded over three years. But traders using Jupiter Ultra appear to be catching significantly fewer of them, according to the first multi-year academic study of protected order flow attacks across major blockchains. The research, titled “No Place to Hide: An Analysis on Protected Order Flow Sandwich Attacks” and published on arXiv on September 23, 2026, was conducted by researchers from Category Labs, ETH Zurich, Flashbots, and the University of Lisbon. It analyzed sandwich attack activity across Ethereum, Solana, Tron, Base, Arbitrum, and Monad, and the results paint a picture where application-level design choices make an enormous difference in how often users get exploited. What sandwich attacks actually do A sandwich attack is when a bot spots your pending swap, places a buy order right before yours to push the price up, then sells immediately after your trade executes at the inflated price. You get worse execution. The bot pockets the difference. Solana’s architecture makes it particularly fertile ground for this kind of exploitation. Low transaction fees mean bots can attempt sandwich attacks cheaply and a...